Stuff Page

2005-08-27 Scoooooter!

Y.A.S, yet another scooter. This is again for the colleague who fancies himself a scooterologist. Note, no connection with the atrocious german techno dude Scooter.

A schwinn ladies bicycle. Its is nicely made and has some classically good components on it. We fear it is not worth much but it is definitely too nice to be tossed. Any takers out there should speak up, or it will be off to craigslist or some donation mechanism.

2005-08-27 Keyboard

Random newish compaq keyboard, has a faintly interesting key action on it so it might be given a test in that perpetual search for nice keyboards. Every now and then the keyboard spillage death occurs and hence must have spares.

2005-08-27 Calculus Book

A 2nd Edition copy of Stewart's Calculus, ISBN=053413212X . Obviously the 2nd Ed is not worth a lot due to the vagaries of textbook model-year syndrome. Nice condition but a little written in. This is a canonical book. It was passed around at the pub tonight for everybody to recall old times with this stuff. It is a nice book, not sure what we will do with it.

2005-08-27 Bikes for kids?

Two juvenile mountain bikes of moderate quality. One had a broken derailleur cable stop so we pulled one off another bike carcass that was sitting nearby and voila, 'twas fixed. These two will probably go to those of our acquaintance that have offspring about to become the requisite size for these things.

2005-08-21 Dell P4

A Dell Pentium 4 2.66Ghz PC with 40G HD and 256M ram. Side and front covers missing. It did not boot first time but once we reseated the CPU and memory it booted Windows XP. Well, it tried. It took half an hour or so before the spyware had finished fighting with the anti-spyware etc etc. It still was not very usable even after that so we booted up knoppix to see what was going on. Found on the HD:

Lots of jpgs showing all kinds of dubious antics in dorm rooms etc.
Lots of word docs including happy little homework assignments.
2842 mp3s, seemingly sourced from P2P apps.
1332 iTunes songs.
Pretty clean cache directories, no porn and not that much stuff overall.

A bunch of the pictures were of local places we recognised, that was nice and fun. Took a copy of all the interesting stuff and then it will have ubuntu installed and be pressed into service as part of ragtag fugitive fleet for a certain highly parralellizable CPU-intensive task.

Here is a pretty random pic from the HD that nicely illustrates the previous owner's taste in beer and artistic compositional skills. This was shot on a Nikon E4300 apparently.

2005-08-17 iMac

While sitting at a traffic light an iMac 500Mhz was spotted with a half Gig of Ram. Seems to be all present and correct. Readily apparent that previous owner was a smoker (literally that is, the translucent casing is brown in places, not a standard apple colour). Upon investigation we discover 600 iTunes and 800 mp3s. How jolly. The well represented artists in the iTunes dir were:

    301 Compilations
     24 Monade
     22 David Bowie
     21 Dr. Octagon
     18 GZA
     18 Ghostface Killah
     18 Boards Of Canada
     17 Brian Wilson
     15 Elliott Smith
     14 Junior Boys
     14 Beach Boys
     13 Built To Spill
     12 Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky
     12 Cocteau Twins
     12 Brigitte Fontaine